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John Carmack on Linux ports

Wolfenstein is pretty unlikely, since it was developed at Raven, and published by Activision. There are no firm plans for linux ports of the idTech 5 titles, but it certainly isnít off the table. I donít think it will be very difficult to get them running on the binary nvidia drivers, but bringing them up to functionality and acceptable performance on other OpenGL drivers would probably be a more significant undertaking than we could afford.

I wonder if anyone from AMD/ATI has already contacted him about this. Apart from the actual issue of running the game, it would be a pretty big PR fail if Rage got released for Linux and only ran on Nvidia hardware...

What a bunch of crap. The real reason is laziness. Id have 3 internal dev teams now and cannot afford a guy to port it? Come on, the engine was made with super portability in mind.

What pisses me off is that the devs' attitude is that they're doing us a favour and they think in terms of, can they afford the money to do us this favour of porting the game to Linux. When in reality they gain some sales and good image that translates to the future sales.

You could even go as far as say that important studios such as Id, Blizzard etc. are the market shapers. If Starcraft 2 suddenly decided to come out just on Linux, does ActiBlizz really imagine they'll lose sales? Of course not, Linux is free and every possible customer will simply do the shift from Windows. Their sales will stay the same, while they will have shaped the market with not much effort.

I can't stand hearing the big devs expressing their worries about the market trends when it is exactly them the ones who shape the market.

Also, until now I regarded Carmack as a super guru and a really good guy but it seems he just lost interest, and just goes where the wave takes him.

I think perhaps carmack might have meant instead that he's familiar with the nvidia drivers. He would be likely to use certain extensions that, whilst not part of the official opengl spec, might be common enough (for example, occlusion_query before it was more standardised was an nv extension) to use. If the extension wasn't available, fallback solutions would have to be used, and that might have some bad performance penalties.
On the other hand, he could just be lazy - but given his track record, his words might be given slightly out of context. If there's a more detailed interview, it would be worth reading it (not there on the page linked).

-- btw, using a method, and being dependent upon it, only available from one company is a very, very bad idea anyway.

Yep, theres alot of small game development companies/indie games that do actually support Linux in full and look to have a very promising future. Whether or not we get another Linux port of any game from ID in the future ever again doesn't really matter, I'd like to see one as much as anyone else but lets face it, it doesn't look very promising right now.

Also I'm no programmer or OpenGL guru but if the ID games can run on Windows and MacOSx in OpenGL on ATI and nVidia hardware, shouldn't it be no problem to support them on Linux in a very similar way? It just looks like a load of crap hes saying:

"I don’t think it will be very difficult to get them running on the binary nvidia drivers, but bringing them up to functionality and acceptable performance on other OpenGL drivers would probably be a more significant undertaking than we could afford."

As far as the OpenGL calls and extensions and stuff, I would just assume it would be very similar or the same as Windows (especially MacOSX which ID does support), and the extensions on both drivers for ATI and nVidia are practically identical on Windows and Linux. What I mean by that is, ATI on Windows and Linux have similar extensions as well as nVidia, however ATI and nVidia have some different extensions from eachother when you compare the two in general. I guess those would be called vendor specific extensions, which no game can be built around else it would break compatibility and screw the customer.

I don't know, all I know is its sad to see them sell out like this but as you guys have said, big ones fall, new ones grow. I would just figure though that Carmack would come up with something better than that to say, why not just say: "ZeniMax doesn't want us porting to Linux as well as our publisher EA.", the end.

our scene? thats hard. few people give a bad rap to the many. All linux users dont buy software says leadwerks. We are open source zealot fags says the steam community.

The real question is, how do you plant that seed?

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Carmack is a big deal, he has contributed alot. Indies are essential but they are not movers and shakers. What we need is a real big project. It needs to be very very linux and it needs to be opengl 3.